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Dealey Plaza

Aerial view of Dealey Plaza in Dallas Texas. Texas School Book Depository building is at center-top. The "grassy knoll" is down and left from there.Courtesy Stewart Galanor.

On November 22, 1963, at 12:30 PM, President Kennedy’s motorcade entered Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Shots rang out, striking both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally. Pandemonium ensued, and the Presidential limousine sped off onto the nearby highway toward Parkland Hospital. Many in the crowd which had lined the streets surged up to an area which would later be termed the "grassy knoll," where some witnesses saw smoke. Others pointed to the Texas School Book Depository building as the source of the shots.

Dallas Police and the FBI took many witness statements, and later the Warren Commission interviewed some of the Dealey Plaza witnesses. Photographs and films were also taken in Dealey Plaza, which the Warren Commission largely ignored but which were studied by private researchers and later the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The HSCA did a study of what witnesses said about the number and direction of shots – this study is disputed by an online reference created by Stewart Galanor, called the Dealey Plaza Witness Database.

The crime scene in Dealey Plaza contains other clues to the direction and number of shots, and thus the number of shooters, beyond the witness accounts. A bystander, James Tague, was struck in the cheek by a piece of concrete flung up by a missed shot. In addition, the Zapruder film home movie sets a "clock" for the assassination. Given firing time constraints, these are important factors in evaluating the plausibility of a one-gunman scenario.

Did the FBI, Warren Commission, and HSCA ignore or mis-represent what witnesses saw and heard? Is it possible to make sense of the witness testimony in Dealey Plaza? And is that testimony corroborated or contradicted by film, photographic, and acoustic evidence?